2.17.2006
The World Next Door (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Srikanth, Rajini. The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
"This book grows out of the question, What is South Asian American writing and what insights can it offer us bout living in the world at this particular moment of tense geopolitics and interlinked economies?...[Reading] must be a just act - doing justice to the contexts from which the writing emerges and challenging one's imagination to encounter the texts with courage, humility, and daring." (1) As such, Srikanth's book is fundamentally concerned with the politics of reading as well as writing. However, it is the writings she examines to be South Asian American (America here means North America - the US and Canada) which displaces the reader and forces her to struggle with difference and displacement - in fact, this is one of the key criteria for her judgement of the texts she engages. "[This book] offers a very specific way of reading and thinking about texts - as works of art that challenge the rigid constructions of citizenship and overly narrow perspectives of location. My discussion seeks to examine the possibilities of a discourse that reconfigures prevailing trends of viewing the world writing the antipodal frameworks: national and transnational, individual and collective, insider and outsider." (5) She finds this to mode of heterogenous reading particularly productive and important to "understanding what it means to coexist in a world of disparate others." (22) The first analyses of the book are geographically determined as Srikanth takes on the idea of the over there in diaspora, transnationality, and citizenship. She focuses on Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost and Meena Alexander's poetry (and activism) to highlight the ways in which diasporic South Asian American literature complicates notions of American nationhood and belonging. In the next chapter, Srikanth paints in broad strokes the position of gender and sexuality in writings by Shani Mootoo, Ginu Kamani, Shyam Selvadurai (and others) really more to put these works out there as contestations/complications of the usual gender dynamics assumed of South Asian Americans and their cultural representations. Chapter four, titled "Writing What You're Not: Limits and Possibilities of the Insider Imperative" is probably the most interesting chapter in the book, both for the possibilities it offers and the questions it raises. In it, Srikanth looks at the work of writers who don't choose diasporic South Asians as their subjects and encourages these "imperfect crossings" as politically important. I liked her look at Vivek Bald's Taxi-vala /Auto-biography, because it examines failure, his failure to find himself through immersion in South Asian taxi driver's lives - in all this talk about struggle and ethical reading, it seems to me that one must confront failure to do so and what are the stakes of failing. I have to say, though, Srikanth's ethics of reading seems prone to failure (very much like Atticus telling Scout she needs to walk around in a person's shoes to understand their point of view in To Kill a Mockingbird - it's all very well and good, but Jim still gets shot) and gloominess because how can you ever be good enough to be this "just" reader? But anyway, she also looks at Pico Iyer's travel writing, Abraham Verghese's My Own Country, and Bharathi Mukherjee's The Holder of the World. It is a really interesting block of works because you wouldn't expect to see them in totally neat cutesy book on South Asian American lit - Srikanth is a very generous critic and I admire that, risky in that she takes authors (like Mukherjee) who might be dismissed as sucky auto-Orientalists or assimilationists and tries to really sit down with the text - not saving it, but just figuring out what is going on. That is pretty cool. I'll quote her ethics of reading in this section at length:
"The best that one could ask of a critical engagement with South Asian American literature is that South Asian Americans, both as writers and readers, resist the seductive comfort of self-representation and open up their imaginations to the complicated nature of belonging in or arriving at a certain destination. I want to reiterate that I'm not advocating a departure from material focused exclusively on the South Asian American experience. I'm interested in the productive tension between writing stories that take us to the edges of South Asian American communities where that experience enters the realms of other people's stories, lives, and communities. I see the tension as productive because I believe it liberates our imaginations to envision bold possibilities of living and participating in the civic spaces in which we make our homes." (196)
The final chapter of the book is a look at representations of America in South Asian American writing, with particularly interesting looks at Dalip Singh Saud's Congressman from India (1960) and Ved Mehta's Sound-Shadows in the New World (1985) as forgotten works of South Asian American lit studies because they don't fit neatly into the political goals of the current Ethnic Studies project. (Ok that was a mean thing to say, but hey, it's kinda true)
Keywords
America, Humility, Discursive, Reading, Cosmopolitan, Diaspora, Challenge, Comfort, Necessity.
Other Thoughts
This book makes me think about what's up with writing a book about South Asian American lit at this moment, and not in a post 9/11 sense, but because so much of her argument is about ethical reading and particularly ethical reading of the other (I mean, all the stuff about struggling to expose yourself to difference, etc.) and how that is predicated on a sorta Orientalized exposure that makes possible all this interaction with SAA lit - she talks about it, of course, but I wonder what it is like to read the invisible other (ok, this is like a tree falls in the forrest and no one is there to hear it...I don't think I am making any sense...moving on...)
Something else she says on partial readings irks me a bit: "I seek to uncover the possible reasons for partial readings and to suggest ways of recognizing, resisting, and perhaps overcoming them by engaging South Asian American writing within a web of interlocking events, phenomena, and attitudes that span a number of locations and historical periods." (16) So when can you ever do a complete reading? When isn't a reading partial?
Ok, also, a lot of the ethics of reading, the justness of having to displace oneself and "engage intimately with peoples in other lands, to step outside the boundaries of...national self and grasp other realities and other imperatives of living" seems really awesome to me, but at the same time, there is this idea in Srikanth's writing that this is acheived through some kind of rational detachment from the boundedness of the self to some irrational body (or something like a body that holds say, "Indianness" or "straightness") and I just don't buy that. What I do buy, I am not sure, but it isn't that. I mean, of course, she talks about the difference in irreconcilable, or at least so difficult to reconcile difference of the immigrant other, she who must work and everyday is that work of fitting in that is taken for granted by the dominant...but I wonder at priveleging that kind of work as the work the reader must do for the work of art. For example, she asks and answers of Pico Iyer's travel writing: "How can one be a responsible Global Soul, leading a life of ethical committment to humankind, even as one doesn't live long enough in any one place to understand the dimensions of local urgencies or the extent to which one's involvement in them affects the environmental, political, social, or economic landscape of the place? That he [Iyer] is an outsider everywhere is a status he accepts; that this perennial outsider-ness renders his observations weightless is not something he will concede - nor should he." (178) Ok, fine. But my question (or statement, I guess) is that we don't live long enough period. So what to do?
Other QE Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Hu-Dehart, Evelyn. Introduction: Asian American Formations in the Age of Globalization in Across the Pacific. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Rhadhakrishnan, R. Diasporic Mediations (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Singh, Amritjit and Schmidt, Peter (eds.) Postcolonial Theory and the United States (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Wong, Cynthia Sau-ling. Denationalization Reconsidered (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Srikanth, Rajini. The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
"This book grows out of the question, What is South Asian American writing and what insights can it offer us bout living in the world at this particular moment of tense geopolitics and interlinked economies?...[Reading] must be a just act - doing justice to the contexts from which the writing emerges and challenging one's imagination to encounter the texts with courage, humility, and daring." (1) As such, Srikanth's book is fundamentally concerned with the politics of reading as well as writing. However, it is the writings she examines to be South Asian American (America here means North America - the US and Canada) which displaces the reader and forces her to struggle with difference and displacement - in fact, this is one of the key criteria for her judgement of the texts she engages. "[This book] offers a very specific way of reading and thinking about texts - as works of art that challenge the rigid constructions of citizenship and overly narrow perspectives of location. My discussion seeks to examine the possibilities of a discourse that reconfigures prevailing trends of viewing the world writing the antipodal frameworks: national and transnational, individual and collective, insider and outsider." (5) She finds this to mode of heterogenous reading particularly productive and important to "understanding what it means to coexist in a world of disparate others." (22) The first analyses of the book are geographically determined as Srikanth takes on the idea of the over there in diaspora, transnationality, and citizenship. She focuses on Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost and Meena Alexander's poetry (and activism) to highlight the ways in which diasporic South Asian American literature complicates notions of American nationhood and belonging. In the next chapter, Srikanth paints in broad strokes the position of gender and sexuality in writings by Shani Mootoo, Ginu Kamani, Shyam Selvadurai (and others) really more to put these works out there as contestations/complications of the usual gender dynamics assumed of South Asian Americans and their cultural representations. Chapter four, titled "Writing What You're Not: Limits and Possibilities of the Insider Imperative" is probably the most interesting chapter in the book, both for the possibilities it offers and the questions it raises. In it, Srikanth looks at the work of writers who don't choose diasporic South Asians as their subjects and encourages these "imperfect crossings" as politically important. I liked her look at Vivek Bald's Taxi-vala /Auto-biography, because it examines failure, his failure to find himself through immersion in South Asian taxi driver's lives - in all this talk about struggle and ethical reading, it seems to me that one must confront failure to do so and what are the stakes of failing. I have to say, though, Srikanth's ethics of reading seems prone to failure (very much like Atticus telling Scout she needs to walk around in a person's shoes to understand their point of view in To Kill a Mockingbird - it's all very well and good, but Jim still gets shot) and gloominess because how can you ever be good enough to be this "just" reader? But anyway, she also looks at Pico Iyer's travel writing, Abraham Verghese's My Own Country, and Bharathi Mukherjee's The Holder of the World. It is a really interesting block of works because you wouldn't expect to see them in totally neat cutesy book on South Asian American lit - Srikanth is a very generous critic and I admire that, risky in that she takes authors (like Mukherjee) who might be dismissed as sucky auto-Orientalists or assimilationists and tries to really sit down with the text - not saving it, but just figuring out what is going on. That is pretty cool. I'll quote her ethics of reading in this section at length:
"The best that one could ask of a critical engagement with South Asian American literature is that South Asian Americans, both as writers and readers, resist the seductive comfort of self-representation and open up their imaginations to the complicated nature of belonging in or arriving at a certain destination. I want to reiterate that I'm not advocating a departure from material focused exclusively on the South Asian American experience. I'm interested in the productive tension between writing stories that take us to the edges of South Asian American communities where that experience enters the realms of other people's stories, lives, and communities. I see the tension as productive because I believe it liberates our imaginations to envision bold possibilities of living and participating in the civic spaces in which we make our homes." (196)
The final chapter of the book is a look at representations of America in South Asian American writing, with particularly interesting looks at Dalip Singh Saud's Congressman from India (1960) and Ved Mehta's Sound-Shadows in the New World (1985) as forgotten works of South Asian American lit studies because they don't fit neatly into the political goals of the current Ethnic Studies project. (Ok that was a mean thing to say, but hey, it's kinda true)
Keywords
America, Humility, Discursive, Reading, Cosmopolitan, Diaspora, Challenge, Comfort, Necessity.
Other Thoughts
This book makes me think about what's up with writing a book about South Asian American lit at this moment, and not in a post 9/11 sense, but because so much of her argument is about ethical reading and particularly ethical reading of the other (I mean, all the stuff about struggling to expose yourself to difference, etc.) and how that is predicated on a sorta Orientalized exposure that makes possible all this interaction with SAA lit - she talks about it, of course, but I wonder what it is like to read the invisible other (ok, this is like a tree falls in the forrest and no one is there to hear it...I don't think I am making any sense...moving on...)
Something else she says on partial readings irks me a bit: "I seek to uncover the possible reasons for partial readings and to suggest ways of recognizing, resisting, and perhaps overcoming them by engaging South Asian American writing within a web of interlocking events, phenomena, and attitudes that span a number of locations and historical periods." (16) So when can you ever do a complete reading? When isn't a reading partial?
Ok, also, a lot of the ethics of reading, the justness of having to displace oneself and "engage intimately with peoples in other lands, to step outside the boundaries of...national self and grasp other realities and other imperatives of living" seems really awesome to me, but at the same time, there is this idea in Srikanth's writing that this is acheived through some kind of rational detachment from the boundedness of the self to some irrational body (or something like a body that holds say, "Indianness" or "straightness") and I just don't buy that. What I do buy, I am not sure, but it isn't that. I mean, of course, she talks about the difference in irreconcilable, or at least so difficult to reconcile difference of the immigrant other, she who must work and everyday is that work of fitting in that is taken for granted by the dominant...but I wonder at priveleging that kind of work as the work the reader must do for the work of art. For example, she asks and answers of Pico Iyer's travel writing: "How can one be a responsible Global Soul, leading a life of ethical committment to humankind, even as one doesn't live long enough in any one place to understand the dimensions of local urgencies or the extent to which one's involvement in them affects the environmental, political, social, or economic landscape of the place? That he [Iyer] is an outsider everywhere is a status he accepts; that this perennial outsider-ness renders his observations weightless is not something he will concede - nor should he." (178) Ok, fine. But my question (or statement, I guess) is that we don't live long enough period. So what to do?
Other QE Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Hu-Dehart, Evelyn. Introduction: Asian American Formations in the Age of Globalization in Across the Pacific. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Rhadhakrishnan, R. Diasporic Mediations (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Singh, Amritjit and Schmidt, Peter (eds.) Postcolonial Theory and the United States (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Wong, Cynthia Sau-ling. Denationalization Reconsidered (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
# posted by SMRT : 11:36 AM
